


Viddui

by Anhinga_Anhinga, JHSC



Category: Captain America (Movies)
Genre: (mentioned) - Freeform, Antisemitism, Canon-Typical Violence, Extensive musings on Torah, Grief/Mourning, Jewish Bucky Barnes, Jewish Character, Jewish Sam Wilson, Racism, Sephardic Judaism, This is a call-out post for @hashem, Trans Character, Trans Sam Wilson, Transphobia
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-11-09
Updated: 2019-11-09
Packaged: 2021-01-26 07:34:42
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 7,521
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/21370486
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Anhinga_Anhinga/pseuds/Anhinga_Anhinga, https://archiveofourown.org/users/JHSC/pseuds/JHSC
Summary: Sam knows a thing or two about that. About fighting to do right, fighting to fight, fighting to get the body you want so you can do the things you feel you were meant to do. About losing what you love in the span of a single moment. About wondering if it was all worth it.Steve’s just some stranger Sam met on his morning run. Sam knows how to treat a stranger.
Relationships: Natasha Romanov & Sam Wilson, Riley/Sam Wilson, Steve Rogers & Sam Wilson
Comments: 45
Kudos: 123





	Viddui

**Author's Note:**

> I got mad at antisemitism and vowed to write every character as Jewish. Here's Sam.
> 
> Translations and references in the end notes.

ℵ

Captain America is trolling him.

Captain America is _trolling _him.

Captain America is trolling _him_.

There Sam is, fighting for breath, fighting for speed, fighting for distance, fighting for his body to _work right _ and _do what it’s supposed to _and _stop failing him_, and there’s Captain America, lapping him for the 18th time.

And then, in the span of one short conversation — _Like I’m lying on a marshmallow, feel like I’m going to sink right through the floor _— Captain America turns into Steve Rogers turns into a lonesome vet who’s lost his lodestone and uses sarcastic deflection to derail any conversation about how he’s adjusting to his new world. 

Sam knows a thing or two about that. About fighting to do right, fighting to fight, fighting to get the body you want so you can do the things you feel you were meant to do. About losing what you love in the span of a single moment. About wondering if it was all worth it.

Steve’s just some stranger Sam met on his morning run. Sam knows how to treat a stranger.

And then a car pulls up to the curb, and the third-most beautiful woman in all of creation opens that beautiful mouth and gives Captain America a whole bunch of shit, and Sam thinks, _Hell, I hope I see them again_.

ℵ

Here's the thing: When Sam first met Riley, Riley said the stupidest damn thing he had ever said, or ever would say, in his entire damn life. He stuck out his hand to shake hands, looked at the Magen David hanging around Sam’s neck right beside his dog tags, and in that tragic drawl of his he said, "So wait, how can you be black _and_ Jewish?"

Sam, twenty-one years old and feeling decades older from sheer cynicism at that point in his life, pulled his hand back, crossed his arms, and gave Riley a _look_. 

Riley took his hand back slowly, awkwardly, like he wasn’t sure what to do with it, and asked, “What’d I say?”

Sam shook his head. Turned to walk away. Said, “Man, it is _not_ my job to tell you that.”

Because it wasn't the first time someone had asked him that, or the second, or the ninety-ninth; it happened _all the fucking time_. Every time he entered a new temple — fuck, half the time he walked into the temple he'd grown up going to, where he'd had his bat mitzvah — he had to brace himself for questions. For doubt. For disbelief.

As if his Ladino-speaking, bimuelos-frying, Purim-partying grandparents hadn't emigrated from Argentina in '54, and could trace their heritage all the way back to the Spanish Act of Expulsion. As if his daddy, son of a preacher, hadn't met his mama and fallen in love with her and Jewishness at the same time, and fell for both so hard he was studying at Rabbinic school by the time Sam was entering kindergarten. 

As if they hadn't all spent a year in Israel for Daddy's studies, being mistaken by the locals for Christian tourists or Beta Israel and getting treated accordingly. As if they didn't speak Hebrew fluently at that point. As if they were some kind of interloper. As if they didn’t belong.

Sam had a lot of resentment about all that at twenty-one, and didn't appreciate getting hit in the face with it on his first day of pararescue training.

But here's the other thing. Here's _damn _thing about that asshole, Riley. 

Riley came up to him the next day right at the end of their rec time, and he scratched the back of his head and he looked Sam right in the eye and damned Riley the asshole said, "I looked up some stuff, on the internet. About people who are black and Jewish. What I said yesterday was really stupid and hurtful, and I'm sorry. Can I make it up to you?"

Sam couldn't help but be friends with him, after that. Riley was a damn fool, but then, so was Sam. They made it work.

ℵ

Steve shows up at the VA like he’s looking for answers to life, the universe, and everything — so, pretty much like every other vet who walks into the building. Unlike with every other vet, though, Sam lets Steve talk around his angst for five minutes, and then drags him out of the building and straight to the kosher bakery by the National Zoo for bagels and cake pops. 

“How did you find this place?” Steve asks, after he’s wolfed down two bagels with lox and schmear and extra capers, plus a half-dozen cake pops, and has stars in his eyes as he gazes at the challah rack.

“A rabbi with the VA told me about it, when I got back from my last tour,” Sam explains. “I know about a dozen kosher restaurants in DC that I can tell you about, if you think you can handle another list.”

“I might be able to manage it,” Steve says, mouth twisting in the way that Sam now knows means Steve is trying to be funny, but doesn’t actually _feel_ it, so he’s faking it at maximum capacity. This dude and his bullshit. Next will be the deflection — “You Jewish?”

“Yup,” Sam says, and stuffs another cake pop into his mouth whole so he can’t be expected to say anything else. He’s damn tired of being forced to explain his heritage, his stance on Israel and Palestine, his Jewish credentials and his black credentials.

Steve smiles, a little more genuinely this time. “I grew up in Brooklyn, you know. Had a lot of friends who were Jewish. Had two Jewish guys on my team during the war.”

The smile fades at that, Steve’s eyes going distant and unfocused, like he’s caught in a memory that he didn’t ask for but can’t step away from.

Sam chews and swallows as quickly as he can without inhaling cake crumbs. “Two of the Howling Commandos were Jewish? Really? They didn’t show that in all those action movies.”

“Why am I not surprised?” Steve mutters. “Gabe Jones was black _and_ Jewish, you know. Family was Orthodox. Out in the field Gabe was always complaining about how the K rations sure weren’t K for kosher.”

“Dude, you just made my day, telling me that,” Sam says, grinning. He’s almost tempted to call his parents right now and tell them, but he resists. “What about the other one?”

There it is — that not-a-smile showing up front and center, deflecting the question with ease. Steve stands up from the table. “I’m going to buy some challah before they run out. Want a loaf?”

“Sure,” Sam agrees. He just met the dude. He’s not going to push… much.

Steve comes back a few minutes later with four loaves of challah and two more cake pops. He passes one of each over to Sam and sits back down.

It takes him five damn minutes to eat that cake pop, and when he finally does, he stares down at the empty stick like it had joined Hydra and personally betrayed him. He doesn’t look up when he says, “Bucky’s Ma was from Crimea, part of the Russian Empire.”

“Bucky Barnes was Russian?” Sam asks, a few moments into the silence.

“Nah,” Steve says, shaking his head. “It was part of Russia, but they weren’t _Russian_. Bucky’s Ma said they were _Srel balalary,_[1] that there were only a few of them left once the Russians started getting more violent_._ She emigrated after her father and brother were killed in a pogrom.”

Steve lifts his head and smiles that broken smile again. “Buck was always real proud of his ma. Would’a done anything for her. When he shipped out for the war, it was the first time he made her a promise he didn’t keep.”

“What did he promise?” Sam asks, already knowing the answer to his question just by the look on Steve’s face, the set of his shoulders, the way his hands clench at nothing, like they’ve been reaching for something he couldn’t quite grasp.

“To stay alive.”

ℵ

Here’s the thing about Riley. 

Riley was so fucking stupid sometimes. Riley was from Shipshewana, Indiana, and grew up alongside Amish and Mennonites and Methodists galore — but no Jewish people, no Hispanic or Black or Southeast Asian people — and sometimes, just sometimes, he said the _stupidest shit_.

But here’s the thing. Half the time he’d say something ridiculous, see the look on someone’s face, and say, “Wait, hang on, shit.” Other times, he wouldn’t have a damn clue, and Sam or one of the other guys would say, “Dude, not cool.”

And then Riley would figure out where he went wrong. He’d figure out _why_ he went wrong. And he’d apologize, and then he sure as shit wouldn’t make the same mistake again. He grew, and he learned, and he was so fucking good-natured and humble about it that Sam wanted to spend his entire life tucked up under Riley’s arm, safe and warm and ensconsed in kindness.

Because here’s the thing about forgiveness. You gotta earn it, yeah. But you’ve also got to give it.

Sam has a sister, Ledicia. Deece was eleven when Sam came out at the breakfast table and Mama flipped her shit, and Daddy was confused, and Avuela and Nonno were confused by the fact that everyone _else_ was confused. And so Deece woke up that morning to a pandemonium in the house that never truly ended.

Deece never really forgave Sam for the upheaval in their lives. For the way Mama and Daddy argued for months behind closed doors, and came back with tension around their eyes and stiffness in their words to each other. For the things the other kids said at school. For the special attention Avuela and Nonno paid to Sam when nobody else wanted to deal with him.

It made sense for there to be resentment. It made sense for Deece to be upset about it all. And even though Sam knew it wasn’t really his fault, he tried to apologize and make it up to her. 

But Deece wouldn’t have any of it.

“Why do you have to be so _weird_?” she’d ask some days, when they were younger. And then later on, “Why do you have to be so _selfish_? Why do you have to make everything about _you_?”

And Sam would say, “I’m sorry,” and Sam would say, “I’m not trying to be,” and Sam would say, “It’s not like that, c’mon, Deece,” and none of it stuck. 

Sam tried to talk to his parents about it. Tried to talk to the school counselor about it (which went even worse than the talk with his parents). Tried tracking down the kids giving Deece trouble at school and giving them hell for it.

And still, Deece wouldn’t forgive him. She wouldn’t forgive him for trying so hard to be himself, to feel comfortable in his body and his mind and his place in the world, to stay alive the only way he knew how. And Deece was his sister, daughter of a rabbi, so she also had to sit through Rosh Hashanah and the Days of Awe and Yom Kippur every year, talking about repentance, thinking about repentance, doing the work of repentance so as to have one’s name written in the Book of Life. Both of the Wilson kids had the formula drilled into him — you acknowledge the wrong, you make amends, you ask the person you wronged for forgiveness.

And if you do the work, you make the effort, and you try three times to make those amends and ask for forgiveness, and the other person still won’t forgive you? You’re off the hook. You’re square with G-d. And now it’s on the other person to square with G-d why _they _won’t forgive.

Deece knew about Yom Kippur. Riley didn’t. But Riley knew repentance and he knew forgiveness, and he gave both freely, and Sam fucking loved him. Deece never figured any of that shit out, and when Sam left for basic training, Deece didn’t say goodbye. 

That’s the thing about choosing. You can choose to grow. You can choose to forgive. You can choose to be an asshole. It’s all your choice. 

ℵ

The next time Sam sees Steve, it’s when he shows up on Sam’s doorstep with the cute redhead in tow, both of them covered in ash and soot, stinking to high heaven of accelerant and fire, running from a bunch of alt-right shitheads with nuclear passcodes. 

Sam knows how to treat strangers at his door.

It’s probably going a little overboard, his offer to help them, to fight with them. All they asked for was a place to lay low, and Sam could have given them that, easy. Could have fed them, clothed them, handed them the keys to his car, and wished them the best of luck on their mission.

Sam pulls out the XO-Falcon folder. Glances down at Riley’s photo, wonders for a moment what Riley would say to all this — probably something stupid. But Riley’d also be the first on board, yelling over his shoulder for Sam to _hurry the fuck up_.

“Call it a resume,” Sam says.

“Is this Riley?” Steve asks, and for once, the question doesn’t hurt. Hearing Riley’s name out loud doesn’t send a twist of agony into Sam’s heart, doesn’t flood him with a tidal wave of brackish grief and storm-soaked regret.

What he gets is: the memory of the thrill of the first time he took to the skies. The way his body felt — exhilarated. The way he settled perfectly into his skin and his muscles and his bones for the first time in his entire life, confident in his body, loving what his body could do and what his body could achieve.

“You got out for a good reason,” Steve says, and he’s right. 

He’s right, but here’s the thing:

Death is a good reason to get out. Life is a good reason to get back in.

ℵ 

Here’s the thing nobody gets about Abraham and Lot, the two angels, Sodom and Gomorrah, all that — the thing they don’t get is that the reason the cities were destroyed didn’t have jack shit to do with homosexuality or sex or whatever Jerry Falwell and Fred Phelps and all their dumbass, ultra-conservative, antisemitic buddies yell about. The sin was in how they treated the strangers at their door. 

Listen, these two angels show up at Lot’s house, have some dinner, are about to go to bed, and the townsfolk show up and demand to what, have sex with them? Hell no. Priorities, man. If they were looking for sex, they’d’ve taken Lot up on his offer of his two daughters (which is a whole other thing). The townspeople are suspicious of the strangers, want to haul them out of Lot’s house and interrogate them and then kick them out of the city with nothing but the clothes on their backs.

And so, because the people of Sodom treated a couple of strangers — migrants — refugees — immigrants — like shit, the angels were like, “Hold my kosher wine goblet,” and rained hellfire down upon them. Lot and his family (except his wife, which is another whole other thing) only escaped destruction because they gave the strangers the Olive Garden experience: when you’re here, you’re family.

Jewish folks have been strangers the entire length of their existence — strangers in Egypt, strangers in Babylon, strangers in Europe and Asia and Africa and America — and the point, over and over and over in the whole Torah and Talmud and Midrash is, “Hey, be kind and helpful to strangers. On a cosmic level, they’re you.”

ℵ 

Throwing Sitwell off the roof is a dick move.

But hell if Sam doesn’t love the chance to fit his body into the harness, strap the wings to his back, and feel the way he felt when Riley would look at him all suited up and say, “Damn, we are so fucking badass, dude.”

He flies again — he _flies again_ — and his body moves and his body twists and his body turns and his body soars and his body _does what it’s supposed to_, from his head to his arms to his core to his toes. And maybe it will always hurt, always burn, always be seared into his memory the fact that he couldn’t catch Riley, that by the time he was falling there wasn’t any _Riley_ left to catch, and yet here he is now, back in his wings after two g-ddamn years, easily catching a rotten traitor just five feet above the hard concrete.

He drops Sitwell back on the roof. Stalks toward him, the way he learned to stalk the hallways of his high school so that no one would dare come close enough to try some kind of bullshit. 

Outside, Sam is all business. 

Inside, Sam is still up there, in the air, gliding along on an updraft with Riley’s ghost by his side, and he’s saying, “_Baruch atah, Adonai Eloheinu, Melech haolam, shehecheyanu, v'kiy'manu, v'higiyanu laz'man hazeh._”

ℵ

Sam heard the RPG before he saw it. Heard it, furled his wings close and spiralled and spun and swooped, heard Riley on the comms call his name — _“Sam!”_ — and then the crash and the light and whatever was left of Riley was falling, falling, falling, and Sam dove to catch him, dove past terminal velocity, dove past more rockets, more explosions, more fire — and still wasn’t fast enough to stop the body — stop _Riley_ — impacting on the earth one last, final time.

Sam never served in the funeral society at Temple. He wasn’t interested in service to the dead. Was more interested in helping the living. Volunteered with the paramedics all through high school. Signed up for medic training first chance he got once he enlisted. 

The dead were dead — but the living, the hurt, the wounded? They still had a chance, and Sam wanted to make sure they got it.

Sam never served in the funeral society at Temple. Didn’t know the right prayers to say, there on the rocky desert floor, pulling himself and Riley together, refusing to leave until he had every… last… piece...

There’s this belief, you know? World’s gonna end eventually, and then all the dead will have their souls restored to their bodies. Will rise up from their graves and go back to partying and kibitzing and kvetching. That’s why Jews don’t do cremation — some poor dude wakes up on Mosiach to find he’s a dust cloud? He’s not going to be happy. 

Sam didn’t _really_ believe in that stuff. Not really. Not intellectually. But out there in the middle of nowhere, covered in dust and blood and fragments of metal and bone, the only thing he could think, the only thing he could think _at all_, was, _Riley’s gonna be _so pissed _if he wakes up and finds out he’s gotta spend eternity hopping around on one foot ‘cause I left it out here like a damn idiot._

He bagged up what was left of Riley, and he brought him back to base, and then brought him back to the US, and then brought him home to Indiana, and then sat in a little white church in the middle of nowhere while a choir sang. He didn’t have the chance to sit shiva. Didn’t have the time. Didn’t have the _right_. And sitting there on that little pew next to Riley’s brother, all Sam could think about was the body in the sky, the body on the ground, the easy way a body falls apart on the first impact and then the second. And Sam was sitting there in his body with his hands in the right place and his bones in the right place and his brains and his lungs and his heart and his guts all in the right place, and what _right_ did he have to be sitting there, in this body he rebuilt piece by piece, what right did he have to be alive when Riley was dead?

ℵ

When they’re captured, cuffed, and locked down in the back of a prisoner transport van, and Natasha’s shoulder is bleeding freely and Steve’s heart is bleeding freely, and Steve says, “Whatever he did helped Bucky survive the fall. They must have found him and…”, Sam finds himself, for the first time, feeling grateful that he found Riley, that he’s the one who found Riley out there on the desert floor, that he found him at all. Sam knows for a fact that Riley is dead, he’s gone, he’s buried in the ground and he’s not coming back until the world that is to come finally gets here. 

It’s an awful, brain-churning, gut-wrenching piece of knowledge, and he’s grateful for it, and he’s so, so angry that he has to be, because the alternative is wishing he were in Steve’s shoes right now, and that — that’s not something he could take. 

It’s not something _Steve_ can take, either. He hadn’t struggled when the Hydra STRIKE team had closed in around them, hadn’t mouthed off, hadn’t talked back, hadn’t driven the entire Steve Rogers Sarcasm Express into their stupid Nazi faces. Sam doesn’t think Steve was even aware what was happening around them, happening _to_ them. Sam doesn’t think Steve was still in the 21st century. 

Steve’s heart is bleeding, but so is Natasha’s shoulder, and Steve might think he’ll die from it but Natasha might _actually_ die from it, and Sam may be a counselor but he was a medic first. So he pivots. Even though he knows it’s useless, even though he knows he’ll probably get a stun baton to the face for his troubles, or worse — he wouldn’t be the first black man to die in the back of a police van — he looks at the guards and he says, “We need to get a doctor here. We don't put pressure on that wound she's gonna bleed out here in the truck.”

And then one of the guards kicks the other guard’s _ass_, and pulls off her helmet and sighs in what looks like obvious relief, “Ah. That thing was squeezing my brain.”

And then she looks at Steve, and Sam looks at Steve, and she manages to beat Sam to the punch first, asking, “Who's this guy?”

Steve visibly, forcefully, grindingly pulls himself out of his emotional black hole and introduces them with the barest minimum of effort. “Maria, Sam. Sam, Maria.”

“Nice to meet you. I’d shake hands, but,” Sam rattles the cuffs.

Maria shrugs off her confusion and hops to it, pulling a set of keys off the other guard’s belt and setting about getting them all free. She glances over to Sam and says, “Polite. I like that.”

“My mama raised me to be polite and heterosexual,” Sam says, rubbing his chafed wrists. “But I only had time for one, so I went with polite.”

That gets a snort out of Maria, and even Natasha quirks an eyebrow over the edge of a smirk.

From the look on his face, Steve’s right back there on an icy bridge in 1945.

ℵ

Here’s the other thing nobody gets: G-d besets Job with death and boils and poverty and loss, loss, loss for _no good reason._ All these folks come up to Job and try to explain it — the same way another bunch of fools came up to Sam, after Riley died, to try to explain it — and all of them, across the millennia, were _wrong_. 

Bad things don’t happen because _you_ were bad.

Bad things don’t happen to teach you a lesson.

Bad things don’t happen to make you stronger.

Bad things happen because bad things happen. Are you gonna sit there and waste your life trying to figure out _why?_ Or are you gonna _get over it?_

Maybe getting over it means retiring from the Air Force, means settling down in DC, means going to therapy and then helping other vets going through the same thing to figure out how to get through it, get over it, get past it. 

Because the alternative is spending the rest of your life asking _Why did this happen? What did I do to deserve this? How could G-d let this happen? _

And never finding the answer. Because that’s the punch line, that’s the whole point of Job and his boils: you’re all asking the wrong question.

ℵ

Watching Steve go toe-to-toe with the head of a super-secret spy agency that’s friends with _aliens_ is something else. Especially considering the street fight beforehand, and the break-in at Fort Meade before that, and the missile strike before that, and somewhere in all of that, finding out his dead best friend from the old days was still alive and still young and still kicking ass and yet had absolutely no idea what his own name was. 

Fury takes it with pretty good grace, all things considered. 

And then it’s planning, and pain meds, and more planning, and MREs, and then it’s five hours till dawn and Sam absolutely, positively _has_ to sleep if he’s going to be at _all_ functional tomorrow. And Nat needs to rest before she pulls a stitch or throws a clot. And Steve needs to rest before Sam kills him.

The secret bunker isn’t exactly the Ritz. It’s cold. Damp. Smells like mildew and mothballs and early 1960’s paranoia. Sam’s slept in worse.

They’re shown to a little closet of a room with three cots stuffed into it, plus a folding table thoughtfully laid out with extra gear. Nice, since they arrived here with nothing but the clothes on their backs, and Natasha’s is thoroughly crusted with blood — there’s even some in her _boot_, Sam discovers when he helps her out of it.

Natasha lays down on the middle cot and closes her eyes as Sam pulls the blanket over her. “Tucking me in?” she asks, voice raspy.

“Hell yeah,” Sam says. “I’ll even have Steve sing you a lullaby.”

Steve’s response is tired, but present, which is more than Sam could hope for at this time of night. “Sure, if you want her to have nightmares.”

“Pretty sure I’m going to have those, anyway,” Nat murmurs, eyes still closed.

“Pretty sure we’re _all_ going to have those,” Sam responds. He eyeballs Nat, tucked up in the center cot with a single blanket against the damp and the chill. He steps over to the right and says, “Steve, c’mere and help me with this.”

“What are we doing?”

Sam grabs ahold of one end of the bed and waits for Steve to mirror him on the other end. “It has been a _hell_ of a day, and it is cold in here. I am instituting the Snuggle Protocol.”

“I’m not really in the mood for, uh…” Steve says, obviously caught wrongfooted, glancing between Sam and Nat with no small amount of trepidation. Nat, for her part, has opened her eyes again and is smirking at Steve with all the smirk she can manage at this time of night. 

“If we were seducing you, you’d know it, Rogers,” Nat says, making Steve’s worried expression transform into an adorable glare. “Sam has the right idea.”

Steve makes a face like he’s going through all five stages of grief at the same time, and then he nods. Together, they push the other two cots inward, until they’ve got one mega-bed in the middle of the room, blankets layered over one another. Sam pulls on a sweatshirt and crawls into the bed cot on Nat’s right, so he can keep a close eye on her bandages. 

Steve kills the light and takes the bed on the other side. He lies there stiffly for a solid thirty seconds. Then he lets out a long breath, rolls to face the middle cot, and tucks his arm around Nat’s waist. Sam does the same, arm pressed up tight against Steve’s.

Nat sounds mostly asleep when she sighs and says, “Mmm. I’m the filling in a handsome sandwich.”

That sets Sam to giggling, punch-drunk and overwrought and overtired as _hell_. 

Then Steve says, “How can you laugh at a time like this? I’m _deeply_ offended,” and that’s it, they’re all giggling like the end of the world as they know it isn’t four and a half hours away, stalking the dawn like a wolf in the woods, and they drift off to sleep.

ℵ

There’s this prayer, the Shacharit. A couple of Sam’s cousins, the ones whose parents went Orthodox when they arrived in the States, they say this prayer every morning. And it’s kind of a weird prayer and it’s kind of a stupid prayer and it’s kind of a seriously misunderstood prayer, but as a kid, Sam hadn’t cared about any of that. He’d simply been jealous as _hell_ when he overheard Rachamim and Tamir say it one morning, after staying over at their house when he was nine or so. When he told Deece he wished he could say it, too, and Deece replied, “You can’t say it, ‘cause you’re a _girl_,” Sam’s very first thought was, _No, I’m not._

That was his first hint. The Shacharit.

_Blessed are you, Lord our G-d, Sovereign of the universe_, it starts.

And then it’s a list of all the things you’re thankful to G-d for doing, everything from teaching roosters the appropriate time to crow, to giving strength to the weary, to providing for all your needs.

And then you say, _Blessed are you, Lord our G-d, Sovereign of the universe_, _who has made me Jewish_. Which is fine, Sam loves being Jewish, even though he can’t walk into a new synagogue without three people asking him when he converted. Even though half the people he meets ask him if he’s a Zionist, as if Sam could ever set eyes on the desert again without suddenly feeling dust and sand and blood beneath his hands.

And then you say, _Blessed are you, Lord our G-d, Sovereign of the universe_, _who has not made me a slave_. Which, you know, is a pretty fucking loaded statement when your granddaddy’s granddaddy was born on a fucking plantation in Virginia. 

Sam’s been to that plantation. People rent it out for weddings nowadays. Fucking ridiculous. 

And then, if you’re one of Sam’s less Orthodox, more Conservative / Reform / Reconstructionist / hippie cousins, you say, _Blessed are you, Lord our G-d, Sovereign of the universe_, _who has made me in your image._ Which has a lot of implications of the genderlessness of G-d, the transitional, ineffable, agender nature of G-d, the validation that no matter how much you hate your body, it’s some small reflection of the Divine. Sam’s read some great books that queer the hell out of that line, and he appreciates having an alternative option. 

But that’s the updated line, the new interpretation of the prayer that anyone can say, and every morning Sam’s Orthodox cousins say the original line of the original prayer meant just for men: _Blessed are you, Lord our G-d, Sovereign of the universe_, _who has not made me a woman. _

Sam understands why they changed it. The original line is supposed to acknowledge the Torah-assigned duties women are responsible for: lighting the Shabbat candles, making the challah, and all that other stuff. And maybe it made sense back in the day, maybe it was originally said with the right intent, but on the other hand, men with power have found it pretty damn easy to twist it away from the right meaning. Men with power can find a way to twist just about anything.

So Sam understands why some folks changed it. And Sam understands why some folks didn’t. And Sam understands what’s wrong with it. And Sam understands what’s right about it, underneath it all.

Sam was halfway through ROTC, halfway through college, halfway through physical training, and halfway to his deadlift personal record, when he woke up one morning and looked in the mirror and saw _himself_ looking back at him. Not ████. _Sam_.

And hell if he didn’t say the Shacharit right there and then, because G-d hadn’t made him a woman and finally, finally, finally, his body got with the fucking program.

ℵ

Sam watches Steve stalk off to find himself a uniform — Sam doesn't even want to _know_, he really doesn't — and then heads back down into the bowels of Fury's secret bunker to prepare for his day.

Nat is still passed out in the middle cot, her good arm reaching out across the space where Sam's chest had been half an hour ago, and she is still too fucking pale, Sam hates to wake her. He sits down on the edge of the cot and murmurs, "Hey, Nat. It's wake-up time."

Nat crinkles her nose and frowns, tucking her cheek more firmly against the pillow. "It's too early."

"Gotta get up early to hunt Nazis," Sam says. "It sucks, but then, so do Nazis."

"Ugh," Nat says. She blinks her eyes open slowly and focuses on Sam, and then she smiles. "Hey, there. Steve head out already?"

Sam looks at that smile and thinks he could definitely, probably, very much get used to this. What he says, though, is, "Yeah, he's off on some mission of sentimentality to prep for seeing Barnes again." 

Sam shakes his head. As a best case scenario, that situation's gonna end in tears.

"Steve and his Sadness Errands," Nat says, rolling her eyes and sighing. She goes to sit up, and winces at the obvious strain this puts on her injured shoulder. 

Sam sits down next to her on the bed. "How can I help?"

Nat makes a few more early-morning grumbles and scrubs her face with her hands. "I need to wash, and pray, and eat."

"And see that doctor again," Sam prompts when she pauses. "You do have a gunshot wound."

Nat shrugs her good shoulder. "What else is new? Can you help me to the bathroom?"

So Sam helps her to the bathroom, helps her scrub her face and her hands and her feet with a warm, soapy washcloth — no water on that wound for a couple weeks, Sam knows, waterproof bandage notwithstanding — helps her into her civvies, and helps her back to their room and back onto the bed. 

"I think, given the circumstances, I can get away with doing my praying from here," Nat says, voice wry. But her face is ashy and pinched in pain, the events of the past few days finally catching up with her. 

"If I ask how you can be Russian and Muslim, that's kinda like people asking me how I can be black and Jewish, right?" Sam asks, to distract her.

The corner of her mouth quirks up, revealing a hidden dimple. "My father was a Bashkir. I didn't know until a few years ago. I've been trying to…"

She trails off, and looks at the wall of this damp, chilly bunker like a particularly important hadith is written there, ready to reveal some answers. After a moment she shakes herself free of whatever thoughts or memories had taken hold of her, and she focuses in on Sam again. "I've had to completely remake myself once already. Maybe second time'll be the charm."

Sam lays his hand on the blanket next to hers, palm up, and waits. He doesn't look. It only takes a moment for her palm to press against his, and they hold hands and they squeeze tight and they try not to think about the day ahead, and Sam says, "I know the feeling."

**ℵ**

Sam was thirteen years old, standing on the bimah at his bat mitzvah, getting showered with blessings (but not candy), getting called ████ bat Paul v’Fermoza, when he realized he couldn’t keep pretending. Pretending to be a girl, like it was a costume he put on and took off every day. 

He wanted to wrap tefillin. He wanted to wear the tallit. He wanted to be treated like the boy he was, not the girl everyone thought he was.

He cried on the bimah as his parents gave their blessings, and then he went to his bat mitzvah party, and the next morning he woke up and told his parents he was a boy.

The argument that followed was loud enough to draw his grandparents out of their room; Avuela swept in like a hurricane and said, “What is this hadras i baranas? [2] Fermoza, ████, sit down and drink your tea!”

“Dezmazalado de mi!” [3] Mama said, lapsing back into Ladino like she always did when she was upset. “Ijiko de madre, why are you doing this to me, ████?”[4]

“I’m not doing anything _to_ you, Mama,” Sam said. “I’m just telling you who I _am_.”

“We’re just trying to understand, baby,” Daddy said, looking worried, looking scared, and most of all, looking confused. His tone was gentler than Mama’s.

“_What_ are we trying to understand?” Avuela asked.

Mama set her tea back down on the table and pointed at Sam. “She thinks she’s a boy!”

Avuela frowned. “So?” 

“What do you mean, ‘So?’?”

“La alma y el kuerpo son siempre en dezakordo,” [5] Nonno said, breaking his silence with a glance at Sam. “You act like she join a church or something. She want to be a boy, let her be a boy. She is thirteen now, old enough to choose what she want.”

That was the argument Deece walked in on. 

That was the argument that never ended. Not really.

ℵ

"This is gonna hurt," Rumlow warns, as if Sam hasn't ever hurt before, hadn't watched Riley get blown out of the sky and dove, dove, dove to pick up the pieces. Hadn't sat in that little church pew with nothing to show for the way he loved Riley and the way Riley loved him, just the memory of Riley's touch and voice and bashful smile, introduced around as Riley's "friend from the Service, he’s _Jewish_, isn’t that remarkable" the entirety of their lives condensed down into that single, wholly inadequate, utterly incongruous statement.

Sam had left the military as soon as he could after that.

"Order only comes through pain," Rumlow says, like a g-ddamn freshman trying to sound edgy in a philosophy 101 class. 

There's always gonna be pain. There's always gonna be pain, 'cause that's the price you pay for love. And Sam has paid it and paid it and paid it, to his Daddy and his Mama and his grandparents and Deece and his high school and four different synagogues and the Air Force and Riley. He's paid it with his body and he's paid it with his heart and he's paid it with his soul, and he'll keep on paying it — for Natasha, for Steve, for Maria Hill and Nick Fury and even g-ddamn Bucky Barnes if it comes down to it.

And he won't ever ask, _Why did this happen? _and he won't ever ask, _What did I do to deserve this? _and he won't ever ask, _How could G-d let this happen? _because no answer the world can provide will ever stop him from loving the people he loves.

"Man, shut the hell up," Sam says, and throws another punch.

ℵ

Everybody knows the story of Jonah. G-d said, "Hey Jonah, the Ninevites are pissing me off, go tell them what's what," and Jonah said, "Oh, so they can stone me to death? Hard pass."

Jonah ran in the opposite direction of Assyria, hopped on a boat, G-d sent a storm, Jonah ended up overboard and in the belly of a giant fish. He repented, the fish upchucked him onto dry land, and off he merrily went to Nineveh and his doom.

Here's the funny thing about the story of Jonah, the part everyone seems to forget: Jonah told the Ninevites, "Yo, G-d is pissed," and the Ninevites were like, "Oh shit, for real? Fuck, we gotta straighten up and fly right," and they did exactly that. 

All that angst. All that drama, with the boat and the storm and the fish, all of that to avoid fulfilling G-d's command out of fear of the consequences — and it all turned out totally fine.

And then Jonah spent the rest of the book pouting that Nineveh escaped destruction.

Jonah could have learned a thing or two from Lot's wife, is all.

ℵ

Nat walks away — she'll be back, Sam knows it — and Steve tries to give him one last out, as if Sam hadn't already fully committed to the cause when they attacked the Triskelion, when they stole his wings from Fort Meade, when he opened his door to two near-strangers and took them in, when Sam realized he was being trolled by Captain Fucking America on the National Mall. 

Sam's committed.

And then his fucking phone rings.

He looks down at the screen, curses a blue streak under his breath when he recognizes the number, and says, "We can get started right after I take this."

Steve nods, and Sam swipes open the call and says, "Hey."

"████!" Deece says. "Are you alright? I saw on the news—"

"It's Sam, Deece, and I'm fine," he says. "Where's Mama and Daddy?"

"They’re at Temple. Are you sure you're alright? Were you near the crashes? Why haven't you called home? Mama is freaking out."

Sam bites his lip and thinks about truth and lies and kindness and loving-kindness, and says, "Yeah, sorry, I was helping out with the situation and lost track of the days."

And then, to stave off further questions, he says, "I'm actually in the middle of something right now, Deece, can I call you later?"

"████," Deece says. Then she blows out a hard breath that's audible over the phone, and she says, "Sam. Be careful."

Sam closes his eyes and thinks about the shacharit and shehecheyanu and seventeen years of being Sam to everyone but her, and says, "I will. Bye, Deece."

He ends the call, hand holding the phone dropping back to his side, and thinks, _There's always gonna be pain. But sometimes, there's progress._

"When we find your boy," he says, turning back to Steve, "We just need to let her at him for, say, twenty minutes? He'll get his memories back out of pure self-defense."

"When we find him," Steve says.

When they find him.

ℵ

It took a while for them to find each other. It wasn't fast. Riley had a lot to learn about the world outside of Shipshewana. Sam had a lot to learn about independence, about boundaries, about the assumptions strangers would make about him and the assumptions friends would make about him, too.

It wasn't after their first mission. Not their second or third, either. It was their fourth mission, the first one to go absolutely FUBAR from the first jump to the final firefight, and the squad dragged their sweaty, bloody, wiped-down and wiped-out bodies back to base, and the thought of being alone just then gave them all the heebie-jeebies.

They walked into the barracks, four of them together: Sam and Riley, Tougas and Smitty. They looked at their bunks, and then they looked at each other. 

And then Riley said, "Snuggle pile."

And so they pushed lockers and desks out of the way, shoved three beds together, and flopped down on top of the blankets without a g-ddamn care about what anyone would think.

Ten hours later, Sam woke with his face pressed to Riley's chest, Tougas and Smitty dead to the world on either side of them. 

At the sound of Riley's huffed breath, Sam pulled back just enough to get a good look at his face and ask, "How you doin'?"

"I'm holding my own," Riley said, voice soft.

"You gotta quit doing that around other people," Sam said, forcing a grin. "That's public indecency, man."

Riley smiled, eyes bright despite the shadows underneath them. "How you doin'?"

Sam shrugged one shoulder, just the barest movement so as not to wake up Tougas. "Can't complain."

Riley's smile dimmed, then. He looked at Sam for what felt like a long time, an eternity spent underneath that brown-eyed gaze. Then he said, still so quiet, "Tougas called me an idiot and Smitty called me a wuss."

"Those _aren't_ the actual words they used," Sam pointed out.

"Well, no, but I don't wanna repeat the _actual_ things they said." Riley chewed on his lower lip for a second, pensive, then continued, "They said those things 'cause I haven't said nothing to you about how I feel."

Sam's whole body suddenly felt like he was back in the air, on his first, second, third mission, swooping and twirling and soaring on updrafts and Riley, always Riley, at his side. He clears his throat. "Yeah? You want me to help you prove them wrong?"

And Riley smiled like a new beginning, and said, "When do we start?"

ℵ

**Author's Note:**

> Translations:
> 
> Viddui: _Hebrew_, “Confession”  
Srel balalary: _Krymchak_, "Children of Israel" [Return to text]  
hadras i baranas: _Ladino_, An outrageously big fuss. [Return to text]  
Dezmazalado de mi: _Ladino_, "Pity me! I’m out of luck." [Return to text]  
Ijiko de madre: _Ladino_, "My child" / "Mother's child" [Return to text]  
La alma y el kuerpo son siempre en dezakordo: _Ladino_, "The soul and the body always disagree." [Return to text]
> 
> References / Bibliography: 
> 
> [Krymchaks of Crimea](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Krymchaks)
> 
> [Bashkirs of Russia](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bashkirs)
> 
> [Jews of Color (on ReformJudaism.org)](https://reformjudaism.org/blog-tags/jews-color)
> 
> [The Ladino language and Sephardic Judaism](https://www.myjewishlearning.com/article/ladino/amp/)
> 
> [The Soul of the Stranger: Reading God and Torah from a Transgender Perspective](https://books.google.com/books/about/The_Soul_of_the_Stranger.html?id=ACpGtAEACAAJ&source=kp_book_description) by Joy Ladin, Brandeis University Press, 2019 
> 
> Ellis Island interviews: in their own wordsby Peter M. Coan, 1997
> 
> The Black Jews of Harlem: Negro Nationalism and the Dilemmas of Negro Leadership by Howard Brotz, 1970 (Content warning: This book was racist as fuck)
> 
> Chosen people: The Rise of American Black Israelite Religion by Jacob S. Dorman, 2016
> 
> The Jews of Harlem: The Rise, Decline, and Revival of a Jewish Community by Jeffrey S. Gurock, 2019


End file.
